Really Bad Sci-Fi: Solar Attack and The Europa Report

 Today, I watched this: 

When the movie title is this ‘70s throwbacky – even with the modern font – you know it’s gonna be good.

And wow, it was good.

This film, 2006's "Solar Attack," had everything: Proto-Buck Rogers, a gormless, corn-fed Joe Johnson, blown out of the sky in a purchased Russian spacecraft that did not in any way look like a Salyut capsule by a corona mass ejection that momentarily set a pocket of dangerous greenhouse gas methane on fire.

The ship was purchased and launched by a proto Elon Musk, late of the national space agency, but also a multi-billionaire running his own company or something; I’m not sure if his fortune is ever fully explained and I don’t really care in the slightest.

The Sun fries a Sun-observing satellite, which squeals in pain as it’s cooked. And then cooks a US weather satellite which crashes in Detroit, BLOWING A KID CLEAN OFF AN URBAN PLAYGROUND. (Which was when I knew I was going to like this film.)

Add to this confusion is more CMEs, the Pentagon monitoring Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic, and the typical forgetting that massively fast CMEs will slow down when the plot requires it. And another CME demolishes a Russian military communication satellite, set to communicate with the Russian subs. A stunning sequence shows two F-16 jets blowing up the satellite before it can smash into downtown Buffalo, which would have been no great loss. Sadly, the Russian satellite doesn’t squeal as it dies, nor utter a cynical “billyat” as it expires. Just a sad little Sputnik beep.

Improbable moments:

1.       The Elon Musk prototype knows a commander on a Russian submarine which has the only nuclear weapons capable of turning the North Pole into a giant fire extinguisher to put out the fires the CMEs are going to cause in the atmosphere.

2.       The Elon Musk prototype does a Jack Ryan to get on the Russian sub, commanded by an old friend. He manages to convince the Soviet Premier to authorize a nuclear strike on Santa Claus.

3.       The ex – or whatever, I assume it’s the ex – works at an observatory in Albany, New York, studying the CMEs and expects that once Musk gets to the submarine and despite the great distances, massive power outages caused by the CMEs and other variables, will be able to make a phone call to her.

4.       He does.

5.       By calling an observatory that’s just been hit by some random space debris.

At least it’s the American sub commander who is being the buckaroo.

This is really a mix of your typical end of the world with a fan drubbing of scenes from Hunt for Red October.

THE SUB COMMANDER BASICALLY DID A CRAZY IVAN BUT STILL THE COMPUTER DISPLAYS IN THE SUB EXPLODED.

Proto Elon Musk is now communicating with the American sub. Apparently they have orders not to destroy submarines with celebrities on board.

YAY! The fires are out! No matter we have to deal with fallout from five nuclear missiles. The blast put the fires out but did NOT scatter the ordinary clouds above the destroyed observatory at Albany. And they’re celebrating in the nuclear-induced snow.

Now they’re all riding off in the presidential limousine, even the Elon Musk sidekick who should, by all rights, be standing there, disheveled, hollering “I want to go with them” as the Red Cross wraps him in a blanket and shuffles him off.

And another: Europa Report from 2013.

I tried to watch the film on its own merits. But I have to confess this: It wanted to be 2001 so bad. And it was not 2001. Nor even 2010, which might not have been as artistic as 2001 but was at least a film that created characters you cared about.

This film did not. It offered a bland palette of astronauts who were, frankly, interchangeable. Even those who were supposed to be Russian, I couldn't really tell them apart from the other astronauts. And they were all young and beautiful. Experts, Bob, experts in their fields, except everything they did ended in disaster. They bragged about going further than the Apollo astronauts. But these folks couldn't astronaut themselves out of a paper bag.

The premise was good -- exploring Europa in the hopes of finding life. And they do. But it was too Lee Gentrified -- the scientific discovery had to come at way too much loss of life. It wasn't good enough to leave us with a film that left us wondering, like 2001, or a film that left us crying and wondering, like 2010. It just had to kill everyone for the sake of cheap thrills.

And I didn't care. Because I couldn't tell one astronaut from another. Only one really got a backstory -- his kid would be six when he got home. And that was it. End of backstory. I guess you could clutter a film with backstory, but too many of it sci-fi predecessors put in way more backstory without cluttering, so it can be done.